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According to Google photos, Cuddles came to live with us around this day six years ago. Here’s a few pics from back then:

And here’s a couple from a few weeks ago:

He’s grown into quite the handsome cat and he still likes to curl up in my arms despite being considerably more than a handful these days. He’s my buddy and when I’m home he’s rarely far from my side and he’s always ready to play.

And, no, I have no idea why I look so stoned in a couple of these photos.

Someone sent me an email asking why I hadn’t written anything marking the 15th anniversary of September 11th. The truth is I’m done with it and have been for awhile. I last wrote an entry about it back in 2008 and I’ve not written another one since. I figured seven years of talking about it every year was enough. My opinions haven’t changed much in the eight years since.

In fact I find the annual ritual to be nothing more than an exercise in false patriotism largely engaged in by folks who think they have to out-American everyone else as though it were a contest. “Look at me! I’m a great American ’cause I haven’t forgotten!” The same sort of folks who put those stupid magnetic ribbons on their SUVs that say “I SUPPORT THE TROOPS” and think they’ve actually done something supportive. The only exceptions are the folks who were directly impacted by the events that day. I do not begrudge them their time to reflect and remember every September, but the vast majority of people in this country that wave their flags and scream about “not forgetting” are not those people.

As Jim Wright wrote on his blog, we’ve had our revenge and then some. Not only did we smash the Taliban in Afghanistan, but we decided we might as well stomp all over Iraq while we were at it even though they didn’t have anything to do with 9/11. We inflicted a death toll far exceeding what happened to us on that fateful morning. Depending on who is doing the counting, the estimates are that between 151,000 to 1 million Iraqis have died as a direct result of our invasion of their country. Again, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Assuming it’s the conservative estimate of 151,000 then that’s a 4933% difference and that’s not even counting the 91,000 people killed in Afghanistan as a direct result of our war on that country. As a reminder: 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and the rest were from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon. All countries we did nothing to.

In the course of exacting our revenge we sacrificed an additional 8,000 people to the cause — 166% more than died in New York on 9/11. We also sacrificed major chunks of our civil liberties, privacy, and moral high ground in the course of making ourselves “safer” without actually making ourselves any safer. But hey, at least we don’t have to worry about Iraqis or Afghans attacking us again, right?

Apparently it’s not enough that we’ve spilled an excessive amount of blood in retaliation for 9/11 while also laying the seeds for further terrorism against us. It seems we’re required to pick at the scab every year until it bleeds anew so we can feel justified in our ongoing hatred of others. No thanks, I’ve got better things to do.

I was not directly impacted by the events of 9/11. I didn’t lose any loved ones or close friends when the towers fell. All of my connections to the event in question are indirect and consist mainly of being an American who was alive when it happened and witnessed it unfold on TV in real time. I don’t need to be reminded of it because I will never forget it. The same way I haven’t forgotten where I was when President Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. or when the space shuttle Challenger exploded or any of the other major events that have happened in my lifetime. I have sympathy for and empathy with all of those folks who have direct experience with those events, but eventually we have to move on. I have had loved ones I care deeply about that have passed away that I didn’t grieve for as long as we’ve grieved over 9/11.

It’s not healthy and I refuse to let it drive me to hatred and anger. I debated whether to even bother writing this much as it feels like I’m letting myself get dragged into it yet again. I’m pretty sure this will be the last thing I write on it. In the future I’ll just point folks to this entry when they ask why I haven’t engaged in the yearly self-flagellation ritual that is 9/11.

On April 21st, 2001 I said “I do” to my best friend and love of my life, Annette Gribble.

The start of the journey.

Fifteen years later and we’re still making it work. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve made it this far.

I wish I could come up with something profound to say about marriage after this much time, but the truth is I’m still figuring it out as I go along. All I can say for certain is I love my wife more each day than the day before and I’m grateful she chose me to spend her life with.

Happy 15th Anniversary, sweetheart! Here’s hoping for many more to come!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 14 years since the very first post I ever made to what would become Stupid Evil Bastard. It wasn’t called that at the start, but it wasn’t long before it would take on that name. That very first post wasn’t particularly profound or meaningful. It was a simple question to myself about what I was actually going to do with it now that it was up and running. Fourteen years later and I still don’t have a good answer to that question.

In those years I’ve managed to post some 7,749 entries and with the slowdown in posting over the last couple of years it seems like we may never break 8,000 entries. There have been some 87,322 comments and a grand total of nine podcasts. I still haven’t made an attempt at a Vlog, but it continues to be something I’m considering. SEB has run on 3 different blogging platforms in that time, has had a dozen different layouts, and has moved webhosts at least 4 times that I can recall. Traffic isn’t what it used to be, but some entries written years ago still see comments coming in several times a week. I came close to packing it all in no less than a half-dozen times over the years for one reason or another. Yet we’re still here and still occasionally have something to say. I was 34 years old when I started and I’m 48 now. It almost seems like a whole other lifetime ago.

I have no idea if SEB, or myself, will still be around in another 14 years, but for the moment you’re stuck with me.

I was digging through old photos to scan in for Throwback Thursday when I was reminded that my best friend, Bill Owen, was killed 12 years ago yesterday. It’s been three years since I last posted a memorial to him so I thought I was past due for taking a moment to remember a man who I’d known for over 20 years and who was like a brother to me. There are still things that will bring him to mind from time to time like a movie trailer for something the two of us would’ve been excited to see or a new video game I know he would’ve loved to play. Every now and then I still dream about him. He stuck with me through thick and thin and never hesitated to tell me when I was being an asshole. I will miss him for the rest of my life.

This is the photo that reminded me of this sad event. It’s from one of my daughter’s birthday parties in the mid-1990’s. He’s sitting with his then wife, whose name I don’t recall how to spell properly so I’m not going to try. He’s happy and that’s a great way to remember him.

It’s probably a sign that I’ve been at this blogging thing for far too long that I forgot, again, my own blogiversary. As of December 2nd, I’ve been running this blog for a full 12 years. You’ll forgive me if I take a moment to be impressed with myself.

There’s been more than one occasion in the past where I came close to packing it in — one of them not so long ago — and somehow I ended up changing my mind or finding a way to keep it going. This despite many lean years where employment was infrequent or non-existent. There’s been a lot of folks who have stopped by and hung around for awhile that I don’t see much these days, and there’s a few faces that have been here almost since the very start. To this day I am still humbled and amazed that folks drop by regularly to see what nonsense I’m babbling on about at the moment. I don’t have as much to say these days as I did in the past, but I still enjoy sharing whatever comes to mind.

Thank you for dropping in and participating. There are few other things outside of breathing that I’ve done for longer than this blog has been around. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll still be here pecking away at the keys in another 12 years.

And now here’s a completely unrelated picture that I thought was funny as shit:

I owe my career as a tech support wizard to my Dad and his decision to purchase a Commodore 64 way back when I was but a young teenager. He intended it to be used by everyone in the family, but it wasn’t long before I was monopolizing the machine. The love affair started off slowly because in the beginning all we had was the tape drive for loading software and it was an agonizingly slow experience. I’d often start a program loading and then go off and make lunch, watch something on TV, play with some friends, and then come back to find it was only halfway through the process. Things improved dramatically when he brought home a 1541 floppy disk drive and load times went from infinity to mere minutes.

Things opened up even more when someone, I don’t recall if it was my parents or myself, bought the 1660 300 baud modem for the machine and I discovered the world of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). Long before I ever started SEB I used to run a BBS on my trusty Commodore 64 (later Commodore 128 and eventually Amiga) with just two 1541 Disk Drives (170K each!). Later I added a Buscard II IEEE which allowed me to utilize four Commodore SFD 1001 floppy drives that could hold 1.02 megabytes each! Yes, back in the heady days of 1983 my little C64 BBS could store a massive 4.08 megabytes at once!

Introduced in January of 1982 for $595 (roughly $1,110.26 in today’s dollars) I was reminded of this event by the BBC which did an article about it the other day because it officially hit shelves in August of that year. Go check out their article as it contains a video clip where an old-timer shows his vintage C64 to some kids to get their reaction to it. You’ll note that he’s loading games from a tape drive instead of a 1541 floppy drive. I can recall seeing C64 magazines imported from the UK that often had free games on tapes long after everyone I knew in the U.S. had moved up to floppies. Turns out they came up with all manner of ways to compress the hell out of programs on tape which made loading from a tape drive a little more bearable so they kept using them. While the 1541 floppy was faster it had its own problems that kept it from being as fast as it should have been which led to Epyx games putting out the wildly successful FastLoad Cartridge which pretty much everyone in the States who gamed on a C64 ended up buying.

Turn on captions to see game names. Though two of them are incorrect (e.g. M.U.L.E is listed, but wasn’t the game shown).

Speaking of gaming, the Commodore 64 was a large part of the reason I’ve never owned a Nintendo game console of any kind. When the video game market crashed in 1983 it looked like the end of console gaming until Nintendo’s NES game out in 1985 and revitalized the market. By that time I’d been gaming on the Commodore 64 for a couple of years and there wasn’t a whole lot on the NES that appealed to me. In fact, had the market not crashed I don’t know if I’d have gotten as into the C64 as I did. Games on the Atari 2600 pretty much dried up after the collapse and that moved my attention to the Commodore (we picked up an Atari 5200 just before it all went to hell, but I never owned more than 5 games for it).

By the time I moved to an Amiga in late 1985 I had owned at least three Commodore 64s (one for the BBS, one for general use, and a replacement when one of the two died) and a Commodore 128, which was largely a C64 as very little software was ever made for 128 mode. I shut the BBS down in 1986 until I picked up an Amiga 2000 and started it back up for awhile only to turn it off for the final time in 1996 as the Internet started to come into general usage by the masses, but the C64 was where I cut my teeth on computing and first dabbled in programming.

Yes, the nostalgia is strong with this one. Watching the clip above of old games makes me want to fire up an emulator and see if I can’t track a few of them down. I don’t think I ever finished Impossible Mission. Which means the name was probably correct. Happy Birthday Commodore 64! You not only gave me hours of education and entertainment, but a career.

Yesterday was the 43rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing back in 1969. I was only two at the time, but I seem to recall watching it on television in that weird way you remember things you were too young to recall because everyone you’ve ever known has told you about it so many times.

As I recall, it went something like this:

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s an accurate record of the first words ever said on the Moon.

It’s been nine years since the day my best friend died. The pain has faded in that time, but isn’t gone completely. The past several years I’ve even managed to forget the anniversary. My last post like this was in 2009. I’m not sure what jogged my memory today, perhaps it was a trailer for a movie I would’ve seen with Bill, or perhaps a video game we probably would’ve played together. Hard to say what it was, but I thought I should post something marking the occasion seeing as I’ve not done so in awhile. I won’t go into long reminiscences about Bill as I’ve said all that can be said about that in the past. I just wanted to say that I miss him greatly.

Give your best friend a hug if you haven’t in awhile. You never know when they’ll be gone.

If you’re a fan of the revived Doctor Who series then you probably know that the show has a long history — this November with be its 50th anniversary — but may not have seen much, if any, of the originals series. If you’ve got 9 minutes to spare then you can get a taste via the this tribute video that counts the stories from 1963 through the 2011 Christmas special plus various spin-offs and specials:

Probably one of the more comprehensive overviews I’ve seen considering that there’s still 106 episodes missing from the BBC archives. Spotted many of my favorites from both the old and new series. Will have to make a point of hunting some of them down.